The Girl in the Red Dress

by Elaine Chong

  Julia

  Richard and I walk back to the station in silence. I know he’s cross with me, but I’m not going to simply walk away without at least trying to do something about the will. He leaves me sitting on a bench while he fetches the car. I offered to walk to the car park, but he reminded me that my boots are too tight, and my feet hurt, which I’d forgotten in the throes of my angry indignation at Henry Silver and his ‘this is what your father wanted’ speech.

  Richard has always been the consummate caring big brother. He’s a man, who expresses his love and devotion, not in grand gestures, but in small acts of kindness. I realise much too late that I should have looked for a husband like my brother and not like my father – though perhaps not exactly like my brother in view of his volte face over his sexuality.

  As soon as I get into the car he says, “I’m going to show you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll explain when we get there.”

  “Explain to me now.”

  “No.”

  “Why are you going all mysterious on me?”

  “Because I need to think about what I’m going to say to you when you find out what it is. I don’t want you blowing up, and I especially don’t want you to interrogate Mum when you see her.”

  “So, it’s not something nice then?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So it is. Is it something for me? Something I’m going to like?”

  “Those kinds of tactics might have worked in the past, Julia,” he says, staring doggedly at the road ahead, “but I’m immune to them now.”

  “What tactics?” I exclaim and pretend to sound like I’ve been unjustly admonished, but I know exactly what he’s talking about – though persistence in the face of refusal has always worked well for me before this.

  “Just wait and see,” he says and refuses to be drawn into further conversation.

  We leave Shenfield behind us and are soon snaking our way along narrow, country lanes. I haven’t driven around the area since before I married Colin so I quickly lose track of where we might be heading, but it isn’t too long before Richard pulls up in front of a very high hedge. I can’t see the property it conceals but the road looks familiar.

  “Recognise it?” Richard asks.

  “Not really.”

  He inches the car forward so that it sits in front of the padlocked gates. “This is Tyne Lodge.”

  Now I remember. “It’s Aggie’s bungalow. Why are we here?”

  Richard gazes out of the window and says in a quiet voice, “It belongs to Mum.”

  Well, that’s a surprise. “Since when?” Richard’s head whips round and he stares into my eyes with a look of wide-eyed incredulity. This response to my question bears a theatricality of gesture that confounds me until I suddenly realise what I’ve said. “Oh, yes of course, she died, didn’t she?”

  “About two years ago.”

  As this latest piece of new information sinks in, I feel anger inside me begin to build. When I open my mouth to express my indignation at being excluded yet again from our mother’s circle of trust, the anger quickly becomes outrage. “This is too much!” I shout at him. “What else are you hiding from me?”

  Richard remains calm as always. “I only recently found out myself and, before you ask, I don’t know why she didn’t tell us about it.”

  “I can’t believe this! You make me fly back here because she can’t afford to pay someone to look after her and all the while she’s sitting on a goldmine.”

  “It’s hardly a goldmine, Julia,” he protests.

  “It’s as good as money in the bank!”

  Richard continues to stay calm in the face of my fury, which infuriates me even further. I throw open the door of the car and scramble out as quickly as I can because I want to hit him with my handbag. I march over to the padlocked gates and realise at once that I’m going to have to climb over them if I want to get into the garden. I can feel Richard’s eyes on me. I’m wearing a new and very expensive pair of designer trousers, and I hesitate for a moment. I know he’s expecting me to fall at this first hurdle, so I force myself to forget about the cost and I clamber over.

  The first thing I notice is that this garden is neat and tidy; the grass mowed short and the narrow borders filled prettily with late-flowering shrubs. It instantly halts me in my tracks. I think to myself, what on earth is going on here? Why does Aggie’s bungalow get the good garden treatment and not Hillcrest?

  I hear first one car door and then the other slam shut. Richard has decided to follow me. He does a kind of scissor stride, hops over the gate and comes to stand next to me. He puts a consoling arm around my shoulder and gives me a brief hug.

  “Circle of trust,” he says. “I like that one.”

  My anger melts away and I feel myself smile. “I think it’s from a film – ‘Meet the Fuckers’.”

  “I think it was ‘Fockers’,” he corrects me.

  “Really?”

  “Definitely.” He gives my shoulders another affectionate squeeze. “I can’t get my head round it either. I mean … I understand why she doesn’t want to live here.”

  “It looks nice enough to me,” I say. “Who’s taking care of the garden?”

  “Ahhh…that would be the neighbours. And that might also be the problem with it – although in fairness, I only met the husband.”

  “They can’t be that bad.”

  “Well, he was. Threatened me with a shovel. And he insisted that Mum had offered him first refusal if she decided to sell.”

  “Why hasn’t she sold it if she doesn’t want to live here?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question. Why indeed.”

  He breaks away from me and begins to circle the house, inspecting the window frames and checking over the roof tiles with an expert eye. “It all looks in pretty good condition still,” he says. “I’m sure she could get a good price for it. Let’s go around the back. There’s a garage at the bottom of the garden. Do you remember if Aggie had a car?”

  “I can’t remember if she had a car of her own, but I know she could drive,” I say. “When I was here four years ago and we all met up at my hotel, I remember Mum telling us that she’d twisted her ankle walking into the station. You asked her why she didn’t get a taxi and she said Aggie had given her a lift to the station, but she’d tripped over the kerb getting out of the car. She made a big fuss about it. I think it was because I wouldn’t visit her at home. She seemed to forget that I was here on business. I had to go up to Norwich by train the next day to see my supplier, Castle Glass, and she said Shenfield was en route and why couldn’t I stay over at Hillcrest for a change.”

  Richard listens patiently to this lengthy explanation, but as soon as I finish speaking, he moves away from me. He says, “I’m going to take a look.”

  I trundle after him across the wet grass. The pale tan leather of my new boots darkens ominously as water soaks into them. I don’t think they were made for country walks.

  I catch up with him at the bottom of the garden. He’s inspecting the padlock on the garage door. “Logic dictates there has to be something of value in here, otherwise why keep it locked?”

  I push my face close to the small window next to the door and try to see inside. “I’m sure there’s something quite large in there, but it’s covered up with a tarpaulin.”

  “Could it be a car?” Richard asks.

  “It could be, but then it could be anything – a stuffed elephant, a small biplane…”

  Richard nods and smiles at my attempt at humour. “The funny thing is, the neighbour said he’s got a key to the house and a key for the padlock on the front gates, but he doesn’t have a key for this. He indicates the padlock holding the garage doors together. “She has to be storing something in here, doesn’t she?”

  “The mystery deepens,” I tell him.

  “Shall we just ask her?” he says.

  “Does she know that you know about the bung
alow?”

  He shakes his head. “I’ve been waiting for the right moment to broach the subject. I don’t want to upset her unnecessarily. She obviously doesn’t want us to know about it, but I can’t think why.”

  “Well, you’d better be the one to ask her. If I do it, apparently she’ll feel like she’s being interrogated.”

  He offers me a rueful smile. “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, I won’t be worrying whether or not I upset her,” I say. “She should have told us, Richard, then we wouldn’t have spent the last two weeks fretting about her finances.”

  “We’ll ask her tonight.”

  “You can ask her tonight,” I say swiftly. “I’m going back to the hotel. I have plans for this evening.”

  Richard insists on driving back to the station via Hillcrest. He says he wants to check the place over again.

  “Why bother?” I ask. “I didn’t notice anything of the ordinary when I was there, and that Maggie would have said something, surely?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Every time I’ve met her there, I’ve had the feeling that she’s hiding something from me.”

  “That smacks of paranoia,” I tease him, but he responds with an uncertain smile. “You can’t be serious? What could she possibly have to hide from you?”

  “Well, I think she knows a lot more than she’s letting on about Mum’s mental state, for a start.”

  “So is the jury still out on whether or not she has dementia then?”

  “I think so. Silvio said there are tests they can do, so I’m going to ask the hospital before we agree a date for her to come home.”

  “Surely that won’t be yet?” I say, remembering how weak and vulnerable she’d looked. “How’s she going to look after herself properly?”

  Richard snorts his displeasure, though I’m not sure if it’s aimed at me because I haven’t immediately voiced my thrilled anticipation at the prospect of being her carer for the next however many weeks, or whether his ire is directed at the NHS, who seem intent on getting rid of her at the earliest opportunity. Eventually he says, “As soon as she can manage to walk up and down the stairs, she’ll be leaving hospital.” He pauses. “And as soon as she leaves hospital, you’re going to have to move back home.” He glances round at me then returns his attention to the road. “I know you don’t want to, Julia, but it’s a question of needs must.”

  I know he’s right, but I don’t want to do it, so I don’t reply.

  At Hillcrest, the weeds are manifestly multiplying day by day. A keen gardener would probably see the multiplication of weeds as a sign that the soil is fertile and the sad, shrivelled up leaves a reminder that life is a circle. I haven’t a poetic bone in my body and can only see a whole lot of work that needs to be carried by a willing pair of gardening hands – and the sooner the better. I remark on this to Richard as we walk into the house.

  “Why don’t I just add it to the list of things to ask Mum,” he says with a sardonic twinkle in his eye.

  The inside of the house presents a welcoming contrast to the garden outside: it still looks and smells clean and fresh. Maggie might be deceitful and disrespectful towards authority but she’s a damn fine cleaner.

  “Show me the fence panel,” Richard says so we trudge outside and I show him. He prods the soft soil with the toe of his shoe. “Those look like footprints. Someone’s definitely been getting into the garden through here, but I don’t think it’s Mum.”

  “Perhaps you’re right then. Perhaps it’s kids from the estate.”

  “I’ll soon put a stop to that,” he says manfully, and he goes back into the house and returns with a handful of nails and a hammer.

  As I stand by and watch him drive the nails into place, I feel a pang of remorse and it’s for two entirely different reasons. I feel sad because the loose fence panel represented a time in my life when I actually felt free to do what I wanted, and the future seemed full of bright promise. Yet I’m also stung by the thought that some horrible little oik might have driven my mother out of her beloved garden and kept her imprisoned in the house. I’m musing on these two thoughts when I realise that Richard is staring up at the house and his face has dramatically paled.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I thought I saw someone at your bedroom window.”

  “Perhaps Maggie…”

  “No, no … it was a woman … a woman in a red dress.”

  “I found a photograph of Aggie in one of the drawers in my bedroom. She was wearing a red dress.”

  “That isn’t funny, Julia,” he says.

  “I wasn’t joking. Come on,” I say, “I’ll show you.”

  Richard

  Julia is quick to go back inside the house. I can tell by the disgruntled expression on her face and the worried glances she keeps giving her feet that the new boots haven’t held up well to wandering around gardens in the middle of a typically cold and damp British autumn.

  My own shoes are now smeared with mud and I don’t want to walk it over the recently cleaned kitchen floor, but that concerns me less than the thought that there might be an intruder in the house. Nevertheless, I suggest we take off our footwear before we investigate, and Julia agrees at once.

  We quietly make our way upstairs. I’m listening hard for anything out of the ordinary, but Julia seems more concerned about laddering her tights.

  The door to the bedroom is closed. I cautiously put my hand over the knob – my hand is actually shaking slightly as I apply pressure to turn it. Of course, the room is empty, though the curtains have been drawn back.

  “No ghost then,” Julia says and pokes me in the ribs. She elbows me out of the way, pulls open a drawer and takes out a photograph then hands it to me and excuses herself to go to the bathroom.

  It’s definitely a photograph of a woman in a red dress though I wouldn’t have immediately guessed it was Aggie if Julia hadn’t told me. Aggie always wore her long grey hair tied up in a bun on the back of her head and her dress sense was funereal. This woman has shoulder length brown hair and she’s wearing … well, she’s wearing a scarlet cocktail dress. Julia’s right, it is Aggie and not a young Aggie.

  When Julia comes back into the room, I hand the photograph to her. “What the hell was that all about?” I ask her, pointing at the picture.

  She shrugs. “It’s called a makeover.”

  “Yes, but why? She must be … I don’t know … at least seventy in that photograph. Isn’t she a bit old for that sort of thing?”

  Julia immediately bristles at this suggestion. “So what? Age is just a number. I think she looks great and I admire her for doing it.”

  “Yes, but why?” I say again. “She always had grey hair and always dressed like she was in mourning, but she looks a different person altogether in this photograph.”

  “Maybe that’s the point,” Julia says with an enigmatic smile.

  “Well, I don’t understand.”

  “Well, I liked her.” She props the photograph up against a small glass vase on top of the dressing-table. “She always wore the same perfume, which I thought was very chic, and she was always polite and well-mannered, even when Daddy was being obnoxious. She was a good friend.”

  “I bet you’re still not going to sleep in here though, are you?”

  “God, no!” As we move to leave, she asks, “So what do you think you saw at the window then?”

  “Probably just a trick of the light,” I say, but I’m remembering the day I worked in the kitchen and heard soft, shuffling sounds from this room upstairs. I don’t usually allow my imagination to rule my head, but there’s something here I find disquieting and I hustle Julia out of the room, telling her that I need to get going if I’m going to avoid the traffic.

  I drive Julia to the station, and she promises me that she will stay at Hillcrest as soon as our mother has been discharged from hospital, but “not a moment before”.

  The traffic isn’t as bad as I’d anticipated so I decide to go straight to the hospit
al because Silvio is working this evening. A valued customer has booked the whole restaurant for a family party, so he feels obliged to be on hand. These kinds of occasions can often run on late into the night so I’m not expecting him to come home till tomorrow morning.

  My mother isn’t in her bed when I arrive on the ward or sitting in the chair next to the bed, but I sit down as the sign on the toilet indicates that it’s engaged. However, when the door opens, it isn’t my mother shuffling behind a walking frame, but another very elderly woman in a hospital gown.

  “Uhhh … do you know where my mother is?” I ask her.

  The woman peers at me short-sightedly. She says, “Is that you, Arthur? Why are you sitting over there?”

  I get to my feet and introduce myself properly.

  “Oh, you’re Lenora’s Richard, are you? Well, she’s probably gone walkabout. She’s a dab hand with that frame now. I’m still struggling.”

  “But where can she have gone?”

  “Wherever she likes, dear. We’re not prisoners, you know.” She shakes her head at me. Clearly, I’m an imbecile.

  I start back down the corridor that leads to the exit doors and spot my mother coming out of a side room accompanied by Nurse Kelly. I hear her say, “There’s your son come to visit you, Lenora.”

  My mother smiles and waves. She’s walking well if a little unsteadily, even though she’s holding onto the metal frame with both hands. We meet in the middle of the corridor and she reaches up and brushes my cheek with her parched lips. “Richard, how lovely to see you! I really didn’t expect you to come in this evening.”

  “I thought I’d surprise you,” I say. “You look like you’re making good progress with the walking frame. I’m impressed.”

  “I’m still a bit wobbly on my feet, but the new hip is bearing up well. The physio chap says he’s going to have me walking up and down the stairs on Thursday, but I think I need a bit more practice walking on the flat first.”

  I accompany her back to her bed and watch with bated breath as she carefully transfers from standing with the frame to sitting on the edge of the mattress.